"She's at work on a memoir"

On the courage it takes to embrace ourselves as works in progress

I added the sentence to the end of my bio as a promise to self, a commitment statement, a technique in self-motivation: “She’s at work on a memoir.” For most of the seven years since my husband’s death, I wrote, the words rolling out of me onto paper and screen and slowly combining to tell a story. My story. I wrote at first as a form of emotional catharsis. Writing lightened the weight of grief somehow. It made space for the pain that had taken up space inside of me uninvited, pain that I knew wouldn’t loosen its grip on me unless I accepted its presence, absorbed it and made it a part of me. Pain that existed because seeing someone you love get sick and die in 30 days and not being able to do anything about it is hard. Pain that can easily turn to anger — and in my case, it did. Writing assuaged the anger, and then it refocused me. Writing saved me from myself.

My first writings emerged publicly on Facebook posts to friends for no reason other than I needed relief and connectedness. I got likes. I got private messages from people sharing personal troubles I never knew they had endured (or were enduring). One, a household name of sorts, told me more than once, “You have to write a book. Please write a book.” Having written a book once — not about my life, but about the lives of others — the idea seemed daunting and pretentious: Who would care for my story? But then I remembered that I the purest kind of writing isn’t one we do for others. It’s writing we do for ourselves.

So I began to weave together all what I had written and all that was still to come. I re-read my journals to remember details I had worked hard to forget, like the exact regimen of drugs that defeated my husband before he could finish his first chemotherapy session, a regimen that proved too strong for his frail body, powerless against the tumor that swallowed his insides. I re-read my journals to fact-check the content of conversations, like the one I had with the social worker who gave me the words to explain to my daughter, 8 at the time, what a pancreas is, and that her father had cancer and that he had been fighting hard to stay with us, but also getting tired. I re-read my journals to transport myself way back, to my early years in this country, when I was fooled into thinking that my credentials were no match to the assumptions made about people who come where I come from. I re-read my journals to recall the sequence of events that led me to finding out I was the lowest paid national correspondent at The New York Times and to calculate the weight of that discovery in the decision I made to leave after 12 years.

I didn’t need to re-read anything to know for sure that the happiest summer of my married life happened right after I left The Times, and that my husband’s cancer manifested itself just as summer turned into fall, and that winter hadn’t yet arrived when he died.

I wrote the memoir. I settled on the perfect epigraphs, one in Portuguese and the other in English, in honor of my home country and the country I have chosen as my home. I settled on a title. I sent it to a best-selling author whose work I greatly admire, someone I knew would get me and my story, and she sent me an endorsement to bolster the proposal I had prepared for publishers. (She called my memoir “a balm to everyone who has had to sacrifice dear parts of herself to become American, and through that treacherous journey, truly find herself.”) My literary agent — my talented, nurturing and oh-so-patient literary agent — believed in me and my memoir so unequivocally that I too got to unequivocally believe in the book and in myself.

Then I got crushed.

There’s more to tell and I will tell you the rest of it very soon. If you’ve just joined this Substack, you may not know that I hadn’t posted anything in five months, but now you know the reason, like everyone else who has followed me here does: I hadn’t posted anything because I had to first process my disappointment and get to a place of self-forgiveness. I wrote a memoir and that is not only a gigantic feat, but the only feat that matters. And the memoir, like everything else in life, is a work in progress because whatever we write, whatever we do, can always get sharper, better, and we can always grow from it and with it. All it takes it to have courage, and courage is something I don’t lack. Courage is what got me here. Courage is what has allowed me to reshape my life, rediscover my essence and embrace the calmer, more fulfilling version of happiness I choose to live in today.

With love and purpose always,

Fernanda.